The Stand (also known as Stephen King's The Stand) is a 1994 American post-apocalyptic horror television miniseries based on the 1978 novel The Stand by Stephen King. Written by King and directed by Mick Garris, the four-part miniseries depicts the aftermath of a deadly engineered strain of influenza that kills most of the world's population. The remaining survivors gradually align themselves with either the benevolent Mother Abagail or the demonic Randall Flagg, leading to a final struggle between good and evil. The ensemble cast includes Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Jamey Sheridan, Laura San Giacomo, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Matt Frewer, Miguel Ferrer, Adam Storke, and Rob Lowe.
The project spent several years in development before reaching television. During the 1980s the novel was initially planned as a theatrical film adaptation to be directed by George A. Romero, but the scale of the story and its projected budget prevented the project from moving forward. In the early 1990s the adaptation was revived as a television miniseries for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), allowing the narrative to be presented across multiple episodes. Filming took place primarily in Utah and Nevada, with additional production in Pennsylvania and New York, and involved extensive prosthetic makeup and visual effects work to depict the devastation caused by the pandemic.
The miniseries originally aired on ABC over four nights from May 8 to May 12, 1994. It attracted strong ratings and was watched by millions of viewers during its broadcast run. The Stand received generally positive reviews from critics and was nominated for six Primetime Emmy Awards, winning for Outstanding Makeup for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited Series or a Special. Plot On June 13, a weaponised strain of influenza known as Project Blue is accidentally released from a secret U.S. Army laboratory in California. A soldier, Charlie Campion, escapes the facility with his wife and child, unknowingly spreading the virus as they travel across the country. Days later he crashes his car in Arnette, Texas, where locals including Stu Redman attempt to help him. Campion dies after warning of a mysterious pursuer he calls the "Dark Man". The military soon quarantines the town under orders from General Starkey, but the virus—nicknamed "Captain Trips"—rapidly spreads across the world, killing 99.4% of the global population within weeks.
Among the scattered survivors are aspiring musician Larry Underwood; deaf-mute drifter Nick Andros; pregnant college student Frannie Goldsmith and her neighbour Harold Lauder; imprisoned criminal Lloyd Henreid; and a disturbed arsonist known as the Trashcan Man. Many survivors begin experiencing dreams in which they are summoned either by the benevolent Mother Abagail, an elderly woman living in Nebraska, or by the sinister "Dark Man", revealed to be the supernatural Randall Flagg. The dreams urge them to travel either to Abagail or to Flagg, forcing them to choose sides.
Lloyd is freed from prison by Flagg and becomes his lieutenant. Meanwhile, Larry escapes the chaos of New York City and travels with a woman named Nadine Cross, who believes she is destined to join Flagg. She eventually leaves Larry, who later joins other survivors heading west. Stu escapes a government facility where scientists were studying the virus and forms a group with Frannie, Harold, and former professor Glen Bateman. In the Midwest, Nick befriends Tom Cullen, a man with an intellectual disability, and together they travel west with farmer Ralph Brentner. These survivors eventually reach Mother Abagail's farm in Hemingford, Nebraska. She warns that a final confrontation between good and evil is approaching and instructs them to travel to Boulder, Colorado, where they establish a community known as the Boulder Free Zone.
In Las Vegas, Flagg builds a harsh authoritarian society from the survivors who pledge loyalty to him. Seeking to destroy the Boulder community, Flagg sends the Trashcan Man to locate a nuclear weapon. Back in Boulder, jealousy drives Harold—who resents Stu's leadership and loves Frannie—to ally himself with Nadine and secretly work for Flagg. After Mother Abagail temporarily leaves Boulder in a crisis of faith, the Free Zone committee sends three spies to infiltrate Las Vegas.
Harold and Nadine plant a bomb intended to kill Boulder's leadership during a council meeting. Most of the leaders escape following a psychic warning from Abagail, but several residents, including Nick, are killed in the explosion. Before dying, Abagail declares that Stu, Larry, Glen, and Ralph must journey west on foot to confront Flagg directly.
As the men travel across the desert, Stu breaks his leg and is forced to remain behind with Glen's dog, Kojak. The others continue on but are captured upon reaching Las Vegas. Glen is executed after openly defying Flagg. During a public spectacle meant to demonstrate Flagg's power, the Trashcan Man returns with a stolen nuclear warhead. A supernatural force manifests and detonates the weapon, destroying Las Vegas and killing Flagg and his followers.
Tom Cullen later rescues Stu, and the two witness the distant explosion before returning to Boulder during the winter. There they find the settlement rebuilding. Frannie has given birth to a daughter, and although the baby briefly contracts the virus, she survives. The community takes this as a sign that humanity can endure and begins the long process of restoring civilisation.
Cast
Development As a theatrical film King and George A. Romero's first conversations with each other were about the development of an adaptation of 'Salem's Lot (1975) in the late 1970s, and although Romero would not be involved in any adaptation of that novel, he did express interest in adapting The Stand during these discussions. While King initially did not think of the novel being worthy of a film version, Romero's reasons were the amount of traveling he could do, as the novel takes place in several locations, and the story's relevance to social issues.
Due to the epic style of the novel demanding a huge budget, King and Romero's primary concern was possibly having to deal with financing from major studios, which would likely have meant losing a lot of artistic control or worsening studio reputation if the film was a box office bomb. King recalled in a 1980 interview of Hollywood middlemen were skeptical of Romero's idea of The Stand becoming a feature-length picture for the story's scale. There were some studios that did offer King and Romero several option contracts for adapting The Stand shortly after the novel's release, but the two turned all of them down.
At the same time, Laurel Entertainment's Richard P. Rubinstein was also obsessed with trying to produce a film of The Stand since the book had been published in 1978, and it became Laurel's pet project throughout the adaptation's development as a theatrical production. In the summer of 1979, talks began between Romero and Rubinstein, and they came up with an idea of how to fund it independently: by producing Creepshow, a low-budget original film that would create a huge profit and increase Laurel's credibility. Both Creepshow and The Stand were first announced in a summer 1980 edition of Cinefantastique, and Romero's attachment to direct the theatrical version of The Stand was printed on the second-edition paperback-printings of the novel. Stephen King completed the first draft of the screenplay in early 1981.
Warner Bros. initially wanted King to do a single, two-hour script, but he ended up turning in a screenplay that was over 400 pages (equivalent to six hours in length). Creepshow was released in 1982 to commercial success, and The Stand project garnered the interest of Warner Bros., a company that placed it into development. The budget for The Stand was set around $15–25 million just after Creepshow's release.
As of September 1982, King had completed two drafts of The Stand. The second draft planned for it to be a two-film series with each movie being two hours. However, Laurel, by the completion of King's third draft in December 1983, switched the plan to one three-hour film.
Dario Argento stated in a 1983 interview that he was once approached to direct a film version of The Stand but rejected the offer due to a lack of interest in working on adaptations.
King completed the final draft circa 1986. Despite Romero's initial excitement, he grew increasingly distant from the project due to the poor box office performance of King's films in the 1980s and conflicts between him and Rubinstein leading him to leave Laurel.
Hollywood significantly increased their interest in screen adaptations of King's work after the box office success of Pet Sematary (1989), and many were being pitched in studios following the film's release; one of these was an adaptation of The Stand, which was reported in a January 1990 Cinefantastique article to be "the most anticipated" developing King project. Stephen King's most popular novel among fans, The Stand was controversial as a film adaptation from the beginning. Nevertheless, King began working on a screenplay based on the book for Rubinstein.
King wrote a 700-page screenplay and then made five attempts to condense it into a 130-page script. Rubinstein disliked King's drafts, suggesting the author knew the novel too closely. Thus, he hired Rospo Pallenberg for screenwriting duties and planned for John Boorman to direct. Rubinstein and Laurel were very serious about the project to the point where they paid Pallenberg $30,000 for just one treatment. However, nothing further materialized. As King put it simply, there was "too much story for a movie", and yet he was skeptical about making a TV version of the book because "you can't have the end of the world brought to you by Charmin toilet tissue."
As a television miniseries In June 1992, King figured that a miniseries was a way to present most of the novel's contents without having to deal with the other broadcast Standards and Practices regular television shows face. He spent four months writing a 420-page first draft without using his or Pallenberg's theatrical film drafts as reference. He submitted the draft to ABC, which offered King the ability for the script to be produced just days after submission. The network also had to follow conditions that it could not throw so many Standards and Practices at him that it would ruin the spirit of the source material.
Worried about disappointing fans, King took six months just to write one draft, "and then there were two more". King wrote six drafts of the miniseries before production began. Only minor changes were made in writing the miniseries, and while it is not based on the 1990 expanded version of the novel, the first scenes of the miniseries are taken from that edition. ABC still had discussions with King and Garris about certain plot elements likely not following practices, such as the use of a mummified child doll, a man on a cross wearing a crown of drug needles with the sign "Drug Addict" on his neck, and open-eyed corpses. A lot of these, however, were kept in the final product because of expectations from fans of The Stand.
While ABC and Rubinstein suggested Brian De Palma to direct The Stand, King chose Mick Garris after viewing his work for Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990) and the 1992 film version of King's Sleepwalkers. King thought the director was good at just being a "medium" that did not alter the story's original message. King told Garris about the project while both were on the set of Sleepwalkers, and Garris signed on due to the content's unusual fantasy elements and the large scale of the production he would be dealing with, such as in effects, outdoor locations, action sequences, and the number of extras.
Casting